Librarian, Collector of Rare Books For A. D. White
As the librarian of Andrew Dickson White’s historical rare book collection from 1880 to 1922, Burr and White built Cornell’s manuscript and rare book collections in the areas of witchcraft, the Reformation, and the French Revolution. His single most famous contribution in this area was his discovery in 1885, in the library at the University of Trier, of the Loos Manuscript, one of the first books written in Germany against the witch trials, and long believed destroyed by the Inquisition.
Ironically, this very discovery led Burr to abruptly leave his studies in Europe, and he never earned any higher degree beyond his A.B. from Cornell (the degrees listed for Burr are honorary: an LL.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1904 and from Washington College in 1907, and a Litt.D. from Western Reserve, now Case Western, in 1905).
Read more about this topic: George Lincoln Burr
Famous quotes containing the words collector, rare, books and/or white:
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“It so happened that, a few weeks later, “Old Ernie” [Ernest Hemingway] himself was using my room in New York as a hide-out from literary columnists and reporters during one of his rare stopover visits between Africa and Key West. On such all-too-rare occasions he lends an air of virility to my dainty apartment which I miss sorely after he has gone and all the furniture has been repaired.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.
I will talk no more of books or the long war
But walk by the dry thorn until I have found
Some beggar sheltering from the wind, and there
Manage the talk until her name come round.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“I stand by your portal,
a white pillar,
luminous.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)